"These harmful new rules could take years to undo," warned the suntanned statists. "Make no mistake, though, they must be taken off the books before they can do too much damage. ...

"Beginning on Jan. 9, Everglades and Biscayne national parks ... and the dozens of federal wildlife refuges and forests in Florida will be open to visitors packing guns. Under the new rule, anyone in Florida with a concealed weapons permit qualifies to bring a gun into a national park. There are more than 537,000 Florida residents with concealed weapons permits.

"Allowing visitors to carry firearms into these national treasures makes no sense. The weapons ban has worked well all these years. It has reduced poaching of endangered species and kept the level of violence between people to a minimum."

The new rules, partially restoring a guaranteed civil and constitutional right, "were promulgated by the Interior Department but clearly came straight from the White House," the Herald complains. "So the department that is charged with protecting our legacy of federally owned parks, refuges and wildernesses instead has been forced to put these lands and the people who visit them at greater risk. ..."

Goodness; where to begin?

Surely the top priority of the federal government (the reason "governments are instituted among men") is to protect and defend our liberties, among which one of the foremost is our right to keep and bear arms. (Even the current "rules change" restores this right only in part. Since most national park visitors come from far away, what are the chances most will have the slightest idea how to obtain the required "state permit?")

The statists at the Herald reply, "The weapons ban has worked well all these years. It has reduced poaching of endangered species and kept the level of violence between people to a minimum."

First, since we're talking primarily about the kind of self-defense weapon for which I might receive a state "concealed carry permit," I find the inclusion of this reference to "poaching" rather odd. In fact, this supposed gun ban did little to limit the nearly industrial levels of gator poaching by the locals which continued for decades in the Everglades. The population of big cats down thataway also seems suspiciously small, if no "poaching" or trapping has been going on since the 1930s. (Fewer than 100 Florida panthers are believed to persist in the wild.)

The federals -- who also operate the Corps of Engineers, which has been diverting water away from the glades for 60 years -- haven't even done a very good job of keeping most of the wetlands wet, for heaven's sake.

Second -- while in an emergency you use what you've got -- anyone intent on "poaching" a bear or other large animal with a small, concealable handgun might, I suppose, get pretty much what he or she deserves.

But what really puzzles me is what on earth these minions of Washington City mean when they say, "The weapons ban has worked well all these years. It has ... kept the level of violence between people to a minimum."

Did going unarmed "work well" for unarmed hikers Mary Cooper, 56, and her daughter, Susanna Stodden, 27, whose bodies were found, shot in the head, alongside the Pinnacle Lake Trail in the Mount Baker/Snoqualmie National Forest, east of Everett, Wash., by a hiker on July 11, 2006?

Technically, since the National Forests are administered differently from the National Parks and Monuments (though the folks at the Herald don't seem to know that), the Seattle mother and daughter could have gone armed in that National Forest, so long as they'd obeyed Washington state law.

Perhaps it would have helped to encourage them, had as much signage as they use to warn about forest fires been devoted to warning hikers "We've only got a handful of rangers to protect an area the size of a small state, here. Your protection is your own job."

(According to Washington Trails magazine, there were only five armed law enforcement rangers working the entire Mount Baker/Snoqualmie National Forest -- a patch of public land larger than the state of Delaware -- when the women died. Was that number adequate to protect public safety? Forest Supervisor Rob Iwamoto told the magazine "No.")

Our parks "today are some of the safest places in the country," the Herald editorialists insist.

Tell that to Barbara Schoener, who in April of 1994 was attacked by an 82-pound female lion ... as she was jogging along a park trail in the Sierra foothills northeast of Sacramento. The lion bit her neck and crushed her skull. Then it dragged the unarmed woman three hundred feet down a hill and ate her face, upper back, lungs, spleen, pancreas, kidneys, stomach, liver and small intestines.

In the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in 2006, one man was stabbed to death by a drunk and, in a separate incident, a woman was shot dead. Also that year, on the Blue Ridge Parkway, a woman parked at an overlook and wearing headphones while studying for final exams "was killed by a handgun by a suspect on a killing spree," the Park Service reports.

How did the ban on carrying self-defense weapons "work well" for them?

And the "relatively small" count of 11 violent deaths in the national parks in 2006 didn't include rapes, other non-fatal assaults, or places from which law-abiding citizens are now de facto excluded, such as the Saguaro National Monument west of Tucson, where locals say the stream of illegal immigrants being hauled north by their "coyotes" can make the place resemble an old-fashioned stock car track.

Yes, you could say our parks have been "some of the safest places in the country" -- if you want to compare them to such other victim-disarmament zones as the District of Columbia, New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Detroit ...

"If you're hiking in the back country and there is a problem with a criminal or an aggressive animal, there's no 911 box where you can call police and have a 60-second response time," explains Gary Marbut, president of the Montana Shooting Sports Association.

"While park rangers now use bulletproof vests and automatic weapons to enforce the law, regular Americans in states where conceal-and-carry laws exist are denied the opportunity for self-defense," explained Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., back before the departing Bush administration finally decided to help us law-abiding victims even up the odds against our would-be assailants, just a little.

Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the Review-Journal and author of "The Black Arrow" and "The Ballad of Carl Drega." See http://www.lvrj.com/blogs/vin/.